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British slang

A respectable London daily has this headline: How the (name of another paper) makes serialisation pay. First, you buy the memoirs , then you slag them off." The deck (subhead) continues: (Name of woman celebrity whose memoirs are being serialized by X newspaper) is just the latest victim of a cost-effective strategy. Could someone please tell me what the verb "slag them off" means in that context? Does it mean something like "to criticize"? Thank you.

Re: British slang

Originally Posted by TheParser

A respectable London daily has this headline: How the (name of another paper) makes serialisation pay. First, you buy the memoirs , then you slag them off." The deck (subhead) continues: (Name of woman celebrity whose memoirs are being serialized by X newspaper) is just the latest victim of a cost-effective strategy. Could someone please tell me what the verb "slag them off" means in that context? Does it mean something like "to criticize"? Thank you.Precisely

Re: British slang

Originally Posted by aderzhang

ys most popular british slang from the most popular hip-pop songs

I don't spend a lot of time listening to hip-pop, but I imagine that usage is a related swear word meaning 'dirty/two-timing/unreliable/mean/worthless... [anything strongly negative, really] woman'; people still use the insult 'You slag' (addressed usually to a woman or an effeminate man). I believe this noun came before the phrasal verb; originally, one could only 'slag off' a woman. Now the verb has a life of its own, and doesn't have anything to do with sex.

Re: British slang

.... and there's also the original meaning of 'slag' - little used in the UK any more, as there's so little coal-mining. Each mine had one or more slag heaps, a pile of waste material. The collapse of a slag heap was involved Aberfan disaster in 1966 (Aberfan disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - I was at school at the time, but far enough away [several hundred miles] to stop me from claiming a narrow escape ) I guess 'slag', to mean 'worthless woman', was coined because of an extension of the idea of worthlessness (waste matter on a slag heap).